[COLUMN] The Dull Spectacle of Godzilla x Kong | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This article contains spoilers for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

If there’s one thing that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire manages to communicate quite clearly, it’s that it’s not easy to be Kong.

As the movie opens, it seems that the giant gorilla has settled into a familiar routine. He is effectively policing the Hollow Earth, keeping its predators in check. He is introduced dealing with a pack of large canines, which he lures into a trap that he has prepared for them. He tears one apart, dousing himself in its neon green blood. It’s enough to scare the rest of the pack into retreat. Once they are gone, Kong seems to sink into himself. He sighs, and tries to wash the blood off.

Godzilla is doing something similar for the world above. The gigantic lizard seems drawn to fight rival “Titans”, wherever they materialize. Whenever a strange beast appears to terrorize humanity, Godzilla rises up to vanquish it. Godzilla is introduced handily defeating a spider monster attacking Rome. At this point, the human authorities seem so familiar with how this sort of thing works that they largely stay out of the way, even as Godzilla nestles up for a snooze in the Colosseum.

Godzilla x Kong employs motion capture technology, and it’s a shame that it’s so hard to find the performers’ names while writing for the release weekend. Kong is a fascinating creation, and genuinely the most interesting character in Godzilla x Kong. Part of this is just because Kong is given a simple story free from the constraints of mind-numbing exposition or deathly dull fan service references, allowing director Adam Wingard to engage in some clear visual storytelling.

Kong obviously doesn’t speak, and so can’t articulate his inner thoughts. However, there is something oddly beautiful in how expressive the creature is, and how this incredible computer-generated monster communicates something close to existential ennui. With his greying chin hair and his slumped posture, Kong appears to be going through something close to a midlife crisis. This doesn’t seem to be a very fulfilling existence for such a spectacular beast.

After he scares off the pack animals, he showers under a waterfall, hoping to wipe the green gunk off himself. He sits down to enjoy the rest of the carcass, only to find a local lizard creature has already set its sight on his dinner. He tries to bite down on a succulent morsel, but recoils in agony, one of his canine teeth rotting inside his gum. It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest that a key inciting incident in Godzilla x Kong is Kong visiting the dentist. It’s also one of the film’s most interesting choices. Godzilla x Kong would be a much more compelling film were it minus one Godzilla.

There are other characters besides Kong in Godzilla x Kong, but they are all going through the proverbial motions. This is a movie with no real sense of stakes and few surprises. No matter how bad things get, it’s business as usual. When a M.O.N.A.R.C.H. research team disappears in Hollow Earth, Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) casually throws together a team to investigate. One might expect Andrews to assemble a squad of military veterans or first responders to investigate a potential crisis, but she doesn’t.

Instead, Andrews brings along a bunch of tourists, offering a seat to anyone who asks: her adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), conspiracy blogger Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), and her college boyfriend and veterinarian Trapper (Dan Stevens). The only member of the team who seems at all prepared for things to go horribly wrong is Mikael (Alex Ferns), who exists to be deeply unpleasant before becoming the only member of the team to die to offer the vaguest sense of stakes.

Watching Godzilla x Kong, there’s a sense that this has all been done before. Andrews and her team discover another hidden world, buried inside the Hollow World. It’s hollow worlds all the way down. What’s waiting there for them? More of the same: more giant monkeys, more tribespeople from Skull Island, more lore dumps about the Titans. Even the big surprise waiting at the heart of this community is just something that the audience already knows and loves: Mothra, reborn.

Hayes films much of the trip for posterity. At one point, Trapper argues that such footage will just serve to make the magic of this place seem mundane, and will destroy what makes the Iwi people special. Hayes keeps filming. When the tribe bristles at Hayes’ description of their world as “a horrible nightmare realm”, he clarifies, “A horrible nightmare realm is a great place to raise a family.” None of this is abnormal. None of this is special. None of this is unique.

The Hollow Earth is not vast and unknowable. Indeed, it often seems like characters can teleport around it. When Mothra needs to speak to Godzilla, it’s no surprise that the monster can make its way to the Great Pyramids of Giza, but the movie seems to take for granted that Jia can appear on top of the Sphinx. It takes a total of ninety seconds of screen time from Trapper mentioning the existence of the B.E.A.S.T. glove to (single handedly) transporting it to and fitting it on Kong.

There is a workmanlike efficiency of Godzilla x Kong. Godzilla spends most of the runtime levelling up like a video game character, preparing for the final fight. He visits a nuclear reactor in France and confronts a monster in the Atlantic Ocean to supercharge himself. It’s all fairly rote. There could be two of these sequences or ten of these sequences, and it would make no material difference to anything but the runtime of the movie.

This gets at why Kong is the only aspect of Godzilla x Kong that actually works. Through a wonderful motion capture performance and some great special effects, there’s a genuine sense of fatigue and exhaustion to Kong as he journeys through this hidden realm towards an inevitable showdown with Skar King. Kong really feels like a veteran action hero here, his facial expressions and body language somehow communicating the sense that he is “too old for this shit.”

Like the other characters in Godzilla x Kong, it feels like the universe has nothing new to offer the monster monkey. When his initially reluctant young sidekick lures him to a watering hole where he might be ambushed by a tentacle monster, a sequence deliberately evoking a similar scene in Kong: Skull Island, Kong doesn’t seem especially angry or disappointed. He is just very tired. He seems to be contemplating, “How could the same shit happen to the same guy twice?”

Godzilla x Kong eventually builds to the inevitable team-up. Realizing he cannot vanquish the Skar King alone, Kong ventures to the surface world seeking Godzilla’s aid. As Godzilla storms towards him, there is a lovely moment as Kong raises his arms in a gesture of both passivity and inevitability. Kong knows Godzilla is going to have to wrestle with him for a scene before the movie can get to the sequence where they team up to defeat the real big bad. Kong’s body language sells it: might as well get this over with.

As with Godzilla vs. Kong, there is something numbing in the empty spectacle of Godzilla x. Kong. While a lot of the action takes place in the Hollow Earth, some of it spills over into real cities. Godzilla storms Rome. A submarine is left adrift during his confrontation in the ocean. The climactic battle finds Rio de Janeiro coated in ice and bathed in atomic energy. It’s very easy to forget the potential human cost of all this carnage, at least within the world of the film.

Of course, as Andrews argues during the opening credits, there would be even more casualties if Godzilla didn’t intervene. Godzilla x Kong also goes out of its way to minimize even the inference of human casualties. The submarine is disabled, but not destroyed; presumably its crew were recovered, even if the film doesn’t seem particularly concerned. When Godzilla swats military craft out of the sky as it feasts on nuclear energy, they are shown to be drones.

There is something a little disingenuous in all this. After all, one presumes that there were staff at the nuclear plant. Then Godzilla, freshly bathed in enough radiation that the water seems to boil, just wanders out into the ocean that presumably feeds the locals. How many civilians died in Rome, crushed beneath Godzilla’s heel? How many families spent their final moments huddling together in those Rio de Janeiro apartment blocks, waiting for a monster to smash through them?

There’s an argument that this is besides the point, that it is overthinking it and that it’s just fun to watch monsters pummel one another. Those are all fair arguments, but then what are the stakes of this narrative? If the audience doesn’t care about the people in those streets or the people in those apartments, who do they care for? What does it matter if Kong beats the Skar King or if the Skar King turns this computer-generated imaginary world into a graveyard? What is emotionally real in this story?

It's interesting to contemplate how spectacle has evolved in the past few decades. The 1970s presented the audience with disaster movies that asked them to imagine recognizable crises, just scaled up for films like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. In the 1980s, those films collided with the contemporary action hero to create movies like Die Hard or Die Harder, which were effectively disaster movies with clear heroes and villains: skyscrapers and airports.

In the 1990s, as technology advanced, directors were able to visual carnage on a scale previously unimaginable, threatening to destroy the world city-by-city in films like Independence Day or Armageddon. In the 21st century, that spectacle ventured into the uncanny valley, through horrifically detailed invocations of urban devastation in films like Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Darkness, and even Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla.

Those sequences seemingly hit too close to home, discomforting audiences. So modern cinema has retreated into a weird uncanny emptiness, creating worlds of digital cardboard where the scale of destruction remains the same, but the human cost and reaction is so minimal as to be non-existent. Nobody in Godzilla x Kong takes a moment to consider the horror of what has happened, because it’s just another day at the office after Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.

It's numbing, but perhaps there’s an honesty in that. One of the big recurring questions over the past few years has been how quickly human beings can acclimatize to events that were previously unimaginable. How long before people stop caring about threats to democracy, the pandemic death toll, the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War, the horrors unfolding in Gaza? At what point does “a horrible nightmare realm” become “a great place to raise a family?”

This is, admittedly, a lot to put on Godzilla x Kong. However, the film’s dull approach to spectacle is ultimately more effective at evoking exhaustion than awe. It’s hard not to empathize with Kong, when even apocalyptic threats can become empty routine.